Saunterings eBook

Hills, and that every foot of soil on which I looked
was saturated with history, would have excited me.
The sun came out here and there as we went south, and
we caught some exquisite lights on the near and snowy
hills; and there was something almost homelike in
the miles and miles of olive orchards, that recalled
the apple-trees, but for their shining silvered leaves.
And yet nothing could be more desolate than the brown
marshy ground, the brown hillocks, with now and then
a shabby stone hut or a bit of ruin, and the flocks
of sheep shivering near their corrals, and their shepherd,
clad in sheepskin, as his ancestor was in the time
of Romulus, leaning on his staff, with his back to
the wind. Now and then a white town perched on
a hillside, its houses piled above each other, relieved
the eye; and I could imagine that it might be all the
poets have sung of it, in the spring, though the Latin
poets, I am convinced, have wonderfully imposed upon
us.

To make my long story short, it happened to be colder
next morning at Naples than it was in Germany.
The sun shone; but the northeast wind, which the natives
poetically call the Tramontane, was blowing, and the
white smoke of Vesuvius rolled towards the sea.
It would only last three days, it was very unusual,
and all that. The next day it was colder, and
the next colder yet. Snow fell, and blew about
unmelted: I saw it in the streets of Pompeii.

The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks
of the marble statues in the Chiaia. And yet
the oranges glowed like gold among their green leaves;
the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed
in all the gardens. It is the most contradictory
climate. We lunched one day, sitting in our open
carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the Lucrine
Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our eyes
on the brilliant light and color on the sea, and the
lovely outlined mountains round the shore, and waited
for a change of wind. The Neapolitans declare
that they have not had such weather in twenty years.
It is scarcely one’s ideal of balmy Italy.

Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this
great Naples, with its roaring population of over
half a million, very much like the sailor I saw at
the American consul’s, who applied for help to
be sent home, claiming to be an American. He
was an oratorical bummer, and told his story with
all the dignity and elevated language of an old Roman.
He had been cast away in London. How cast away?
Oh! it was all along of a boarding-house. And
then he found himself shipped on an English vessel,
and he had lost his discharge-papers; and “Listen,
your honor,” said he, calmly extending his right
hand, “here I am cast away on this desolate
island with nothing before me but wind and weather.”